FIRST COMPLETE EDITION. Michael Hadrianides' 1669 edition of Petronius is the first to incorporate the "Fragmentum" discovered in Trau, Dalmatia, which contained the hitherto unknown text of the "Cena Trimalchionis" and is also "the first edition to contain all the fragments of the novel that we currently possess". This copy is bound together with the -often lacking- 1670 edition of the "Fragmentum", which prints the text as it appeared in the manuscript, here edited by Johannes Lucius, with the Apologia of Marino Statileo, who discovered the manuscript in Dalmatia.

The story of Petronius' partial rescue during the Renaissance is full of twists and ironies; Petronius himself would have enjoyed it. He was saved from oblivion by Poggio Bracciolini's discovery, in 1420 in Cologne, of a manuscript containing Carolingian excerpts written continuously. This version, which favored verse and dialogue over description and narration and attempted to repress the novel's exuberant homosexuality, formed the basis of the editio princeps, published in Milan in 1482. It was not until the sixteenth century that scholars doubled the amount of text available. The first expanded edition, the editio Tornaesiana, was published in Lyon in 1575 but did not contain the still unknown "Dinner of Trimalchio". The "Cena" had been copied for Poggio in 1423 in Florence, but then vanished; the text was not rediscovered until almost a century later, by Marino Statileo in Trogir in Dalmatia, and was not published until 1664." (Conte)